Book Review – The UK Challenge to Europeanization: The Persistence of British Euroscepticism

The UK was for the dominance of a free trade regime in Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Therefore, she approached the European Union integration hesitantly from the very beginning primarily because of her jealousy about sovereignty and she even tried to undermine the success of the project by forming her own alternative free trade model. Under the influence of external and internal factors, the UK changed her mind very quickly and sought for the EU membership in 1961. It takes more than a decade for the UK to achieve the EU membership due to her well-known previous sceptical positioning towards the EU project. The Euroscepticism of the UK wasn’t disappeared all of a sudden after the EU membership of the country in 1973. The UK has always paid effort in order to change the rules of the game or to block the further steps taken at the expense of the sovereignties of the EU member states. As a result, this high level of Euroscepticism forced other members of the EU to give some concessions to the UK in order to achieve a higher level of integration for the sake of policies such as common currency and Schengen visa-free regime.